So its been 3 and a half months since i said good bye to TISS and started my life as an adult working in the big bad real world. Trust me when i say this that these have not been the easiest days of my life for i thought i could never be happy again away from the friends whom i had literally( and well metaphorically feels like) spent an entire lifetime of having fun, learning, sharing and caring and away from the campus to whom i owe the best days of my life. I had started becoming angry and irritated all the time and would start a fight with anyone and everyone over the smallest of reasons. Happiness it seemed had made an exit with my exit from the city of dreams. I knew i was working for a cause i felt for but there was no passion something was missing. I felt a disconnect from people. And i couldn't explain or understand why.
Anyways we all have to earn a living don't we ? So here continues my story in distress.
So my mom likes to feed people and those of you have met me will understand that what i say is true. She packs a hearty lunch for office along with fruits and salad. And i (since i have been in a nasty mood for sometime) usually end up not eating the apple or the pear which then rots in the bag for days. On our way back home from the office among heavy traffic we cross an area of the city where certain people have made the city roundabout their home. The traffic is one of the most irritating parts about living in the capital city, one of the many things that i wish i could change about it. But if it wouldn't have been for the traffic jam i would have never realised how easy it can be to be happy. It was in one of these traffics that the smile of a 5 years old boy made me see the simplicity of life. As usual that day i had not eaten the pear that mom had given me, this 5 yrs old ran up to our car in the hope that he could get some money, i realised i must be leaving him him disappointed by giving him a pear instead of the money that he was hoping but then i have always preferred to give food instead of money.
I think i have never been more happy to be proven wrong in my life than that 5 yrs old smile and happiness at having received the fruit. The car was stuck in the jam for about i think 10 minutes and the entire of those 10 minutes the child played with the fruit like it was a jewel. The shine in his eyes and the happiness on his face brought tears to my eyes and a new kind of satisfaction to my heart which i had never experienced before. It was not the so called 'good thing' that i had done that had brought this satisfaction and happiness but just the feeling of contentment on the face of that child that made me realise that i should stop wasting my time in finding happiness in people and pricey things but should start cherishing the small and minute details of life. That child taught me a lesson of life that no bool or no professor in a university could teach me. He taught me how to live life again.
I dont know whether he ate the pear, as he was so mesmerised by it that the 10 minutes that i was observing him he couldn't stop admiring the fruit. I gestured at him to eat it but all he did was smile back, thanking me for the fruit that i had given him. I only wish there was a way i could thank him for teaching me the lesson of life that made the whole difference.
Rishika Gupta
Field Program Officer
Wadhwani Foundation
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